13 reasons why your brain craves infographics

Matt Abrahams: Tips and Techniques for More Confident and Compelling Presentations The ability to present your ideas in a clear, confident, and authentic manner can make a huge difference in your business (and personal) success. Yet many people are anxious or under-practiced in presenting effectively. The best way to feel more confident and deliver engaging presentations is through smart and thorough preparation and practice. From first planning through actual delivery, these tips and techniques can help you be a more compelling speaker and ensure your audience gets your message.

Rock Your Next Work Presentation By Following These 5 Rules Work presentations really matter. How well you present goes a long way to determining how your colleagues perceive you, and directly affects your ability to advance your career. You know, no pressure or anything. Don’t fret though, we are here to help. Using advice from experts in the LinkedIn Learning Library, we came up with five surefire rules that, if followed, will make you present like a rock star. How to Pump Yourself Up Before a Presentation (or Calm Yourself Down) Executive Summary Public speaking affects people in different ways. Some people get jittery and anxious before they talk; they need to spend time calming themselves down before they go onstage. Other people want to make sure they have extra energy when they’re in front of an audience. These people need to spend time amping themselves up before a talk — doing whatever helps them feel invigorated. The key is to tap into whichever ”pre-talk ritual” makes you uniquely your best right before you walk on stage.

How to Engage an Audience in an Online Presentation I once made a sandwich, responded to an email, and let the dog out--all while “watching” an online presentation. I’m not proud. And I’m not alone. InterCall, the world’s largest conference call company found that audiences are engaged in a number of activities while on conference calls. Everything from doing other work (65%), to eating or making food (55%), to online shopping (21%). How conscious are you of the differences between presenting online and presenting face-to-face? Are there important distinctions between presenting online and presenting face-to-face, in person, in the same room as your audience? We’ve done a lot of thinking about this recently as we are coaching business presenting far more online currently, than face-to-face, and the answer to us seems to be that there are many differences between the two, but they are mostly ones of which we are not even conscious! However, when we do become conscious of the differences between presenting online and presenting face-to-face, we believe it really helps us get to grips with presenting online more fluently, confidently and persuasively.

How to Start a Presentation in a Way That'll Immediately Capture the Room When I went to journalism school, probably 50 percent of our time was dedicated to ledes (that’s journalism-speak for the first line in an article). We looked at the great ledes in history, learned all the different types of ledes and had assignment after assignment where we’d write lede after lede for fictitious news stories. Why so much focus on the first sentence on a piece? 5 Best Practices For Making Awesome PowerPoint Slides Most PowerPoint presentations are the worst. Far too often, the slides are text-heavy and the person simply reads them off. And while there is important information being discussed and employees have the best of intentions of listening, their minds invariably begin to wonder and boredom prevails. Don’t let that happen. Make your presentations memorable by having awesome slides that enhance your presentation, not take away from it. In her LinkedIn Learning course Content Marketing: Slides, Instructor Dayna Rothman gave five best practices for creating awesome slides that’ll make your presentation stand out.

To Overcome Your Fear of Public Speaking, Stop Thinking About Yourself Executive Summary Even the most confident speakers find ways to distance themselves from their audience. It’s how our brains are programmed, so how can we overcome it? Human generosity. The key to calming the amygdala and disarming our panic button is to turn the focus away from ourselves — away from whether we will mess up or whether the audience will like us — and toward helping the audience. Showing kindness and generosity to others has been shown to activate the vagus nerve, which has the power to calm the fight-or-flight response.